Example discovery as long been a painful point for teams and in some cases vendors. I see teams coming from two groups of people related to examples.
Group #1: They roughly know what they want but not sure where to find it.
Group #2: They have no idea what they want and no idea where to find it.
The thing both of these groups have in common is the inability to find examples. They are linked in the docs, cross-linked in various articles, and yet they still can't find it without trawling through Github. This becomes the core of my argument that examples in VS Code are not obvious.
As such, I would like to propose the following UX
The following UX attempts to create a sort of guided pathway for project creation (as indicated by explicit steps). The important takeaway here is that examples and templates gain descriptions and nesting. This nesting will be defined with a defined schema represented with JSON at the root of vendorexamples with the name examples.json.
A proposed schema for this is below.
{
"Vendor": "CTR Electronics",
"Description": "Examples provided by CTR Electronics",
"SchemaVersion": "1.0.0.0",
"Examples": [
{
"Title": "Swerve Examples",
"Description": "Various examples demonstrating controlling a Swerve Robot",
"IsExample": false,
"Examples": [
{
"Title": "Swerve with Path Planner",
"IsExample": true,
"Path": "java/swerve/swervewithpathplanner"
}
]
},
{
"Title": "2024 Example Robot",
"Description": "A fully built example demonstrating a complete codebase for controlling a robot to compete in the 2024 game.",
"IsExample": true,
"Path": "java/2024examplebot"
}
]
}
The VS Code extension can iterate through all available example.json and build a tree. The above schema allows infinite number of nested sub-categories, but an arbitrary limit can be imposed if wanted.
Example discovery as long been a painful point for teams and in some cases vendors. I see teams coming from two groups of people related to examples.
Group #1: They roughly know what they want but not sure where to find it. Group #2: They have no idea what they want and no idea where to find it.
The thing both of these groups have in common is the inability to find examples. They are linked in the docs, cross-linked in various articles, and yet they still can't find it without trawling through Github. This becomes the core of my argument that examples in VS Code are not obvious.
As such, I would like to propose the following UX
The following UX attempts to create a sort of guided pathway for project creation (as indicated by explicit steps). The important takeaway here is that examples and templates gain descriptions and nesting. This nesting will be defined with a defined schema represented with JSON at the root of
vendorexampleswith the nameexamples.json.A proposed schema for this is below.
The VS Code extension can iterate through all available
example.jsonand build a tree. The above schema allows infinite number of nested sub-categories, but an arbitrary limit can be imposed if wanted.